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Back to the future

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28 October 2015 / Roger Smith
Issue: 7674 / Categories: Opinion
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Roger Smith embarks on some legal time-travel

In the month that includes “Back to the Future Day”, October 21, we should look at how legal practice is developing. We might remind ourselves that, whatever lawyers—particularly legal aid practitioners—were saying in October 1985, actually they had never had it so good. The duty solicitor scheme was about to be expanded: expenditure was on the up and set for a record climb through the next decade. The future is going to be so different.

Legal aid: here

Conferences in Birmingham (organised by the Legal Aid Practitioners Group (LAPG)) and Belfast (the Public Interest Litigation Support project) discussed the future for legal aid practitioners. Both were pretty bleak. In particular, the LAPG delegates knew they were under the cosh. The good news was that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) had sent representatives for the first time: the bad news is what they said when they came. In truth, the Legal Aid Agency’s Hugh Barrett and Caroline Crowther had little option but to mouth their masters’ line that

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